


cana

by Askance



Series: Mashiach [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, Implied Future Character Death, M/M, Mild Implied Incest, Religious Content, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stigmata
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-30 00:10:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean understands blood. Sometimes he thinks he understands blood better than he understands anything else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cana

Dean understands blood. Sometimes he thinks he understands blood better than he understands anything else. He keeps a map at the forefront of his mind at all times, like a stamp against his skull, of all the veins and arteries in a human body, the better know where to stitch, where to aim, where to avoid. He gauges panic and calm by the map. It’s an advantage in a world that is so strictly without advantages.

He knows the way blood looks—the exact colour of his own, of Sam’s, of Castiel’s, of this monster or that. He knows the way it flows across skin or from wounds, understands its capillary action into bandages and fabric.

Blood is safe. It makes sense to him.

It makes sense, then, that the sight of the nail holes in Sam’s hands and feet don’t bother him by their nature alone. He’s seen his brother riddled with holes before. He’s seen Sam bleed and he knows that, most of the time, he is fully capable of stymieing it, because he knows it.

So far he hasn’t been able to stop these particular wounds from bleeding for very long, but he tries not to let this bother him. It’s only been a few weeks since the affliction hit, and Sam seems as okay as one can be while bedridden—he is losing weight but he still laughs and talks and smiles, and this gives Dean hope. He doesn’t know how long the hope will last, but for now it’s enough.

Dean is growing somewhat used to the sight of his little brother’s injuries—he can stand them because he can reduce them to their core: he places them against the map. They bleed slow. They are in safe places. Sam is still here after three weeks and he can still smile. There’s time to figure out an answer. He doesn’t need to panic.

Their time picks up a soft routine; Sam bleeds through his bandages at least four times a day. Dean bought a few small porcelain bowls a while ago and keeps them stacked beside Sam’s bed and makes a habit of filling them with warm water and bathing Sam’s hands and feet, wrapping them up clean again. He throws the bloody leftovers out into the grass outside their motel door and watches it soak into the ground. All in all, right now, this is something they can deal with.

Today the motel’s television remote is placed on Sam’s mattress facing the set in the corner, and he is flipping through channels quietly with the tip of one finger, unable to grip it and use it normally. The staticky screen switches over from late afternoon talk shows to cooking tutorials to the Home Shopping Network—rests for a moment on a televangelist extolling the Lord—when Dean quirks an eyebrow from the opposite side of the bed, Sam smiles sheepishly and turns it over to a soap opera he’s never heard of.

Dean’s fingers are holding his left hand gently above one of the bowls, cleaning away the blood that’s congealed in the hole in his palm. Dean has made it his quiet goal to clean them so well that he can see through them, like a keyhole. So far he hasn’t succeeded.

“Scale of one to ten,” he asks, lightly, trying to make conversation. “How bad do they hurt today?”

Sam sniffs. “Eight,” he says.

Dean is continually surprised by how calm Sam is about all this. Mystery wounds from nowhere, excruciating pain all hours of the day, unable to walk or even hold a TV remote, and yet he is as gentle-faced and content as if he were suffering from a mere common cold, or laid up with a broken leg. Dean still doesn’t have a name to put to this, but he thinks Sam does—thinks he knows what this is but won’t say, and if he won’t say, it’s probably because he thinks Dean won’t understand; no matter. He intends to call Cas down as soon as possible to set things straight. If anyone will know, and be willing to tell Dean, it’ll be Cas.

For now, though, he can do what he does best. He can understand the physical and leave the abstract for later.

Sam changes the channel again, and again, pausing every time he comes across that televangelist. Dean sees him suck his lower lip between his teeth for a moment, as if embarrassed, and switches it again. The television clicks against the big-tent voice proclaiming the words _wedding at—_ and Dean lets Sam’s hand rest in the water for a moment to squeeze out the washrag.

“If you wanna watch that, you can,” he says. “No judgment.”

Sam scoffs. “Right.”

“I’m serious.”

Sam doesn’t say anything. He settles on a short, curvaceous woman cheerfully concocting some kind of dessert, the cooking channel’s logo so big on the screen that it obliterates half of her kitchen counter.

_Now, this is perfect for any kind of summer outdoor occasion—_

At first Dean thinks he’s hallucinating when he turns back and lifts Sam’s hand again—but he trusts himself enough to know what he senses. He smells flowers. And when, brow furrowing in confusion, he hesitantly dips his head and breathes again, he smells them again—and it’s definitely rising from the bowl on Sam’s mattress, and the bloody swirling water.

“You smell flowers?” he says, and Sam turns to him, confused, and pauses.

“Yeah,” he says.

On the television the woman says, _a backyard party? Excellent, it’s just excellent. And formal enough—let’s put our strawberries in there—formal enough even for an outdoor wedding—_

Just as abruptly as it came the smell of flowers vanishes, and Sam and Dean look at one another.

“Is the window open?” Sam asks—but before Dean can even open his mouth to reply in the negative his face contorts and he turns his head sharply away and his hand convulses suddenly in the bowl of water, sloshing it over the sides, blotching the white sheets pink.

“Sammy?” Dean says, concerned, reaching up without thinking to touch his face, and Sam relaxes, sagging against the pillows stacked up behind his head, and stares down at his hand.

Dean follows his eyes.

He understands blood. He knows how it looks, smells, operates, knows how it swirls and blossoms and smudges on flesh, and what is staining the water now from the hole in Sam’s hand is not blood.

It’s darker, more purple, more thin. It clouds and rises—blood sinks. This does not fit into the map.

Dean feels his heart jump. _It doesn’t fit._

Sam swallows, lifting his hand hesitantly from the water, turning it over. The not-blood rolls down his fingers in beads. Dean can smell, just as he had smelled flowers moments ago, the familiar tang of alcohol.

“Wine,” Sam whispers, with awe on his face.

The television shudders and they look toward it, watch it flip itself back to the televangelist—his arms upraised to address the static-muffled crowd, crowing.

_And here, my friends, here is where our Lord Jesus Christ performed his first miracle, yes, friends, at Cana of Galilee—_

Sam turns back to Dean, his eyes wide, and holds up his stained fingers. Dean can’t move. The map is shattering. Human beings don’t bleed wine.

Sam’s fingertips brush against his cheek in a way that betrays Sam’s wonder, as if saying _look, feel_ , and he flinches. A drop of the not-blood catches and rolls down his cheek and comes to rest in the corner of his mouth and Dean shivers, pulls away, wipes at his lips with the side of his hand.

He was afraid of this. It’s not just blood and torn flesh anymore. It’s—

_A miracle,_ the televangelist says.

Sam is letting his fingertips rest in awe on the surface of the bowl of wine. Dean feels, suddenly, that he is going to be violently sick.

—

Blood comes back by the end of the day. Half of Dean is relieved to see the familiar bright red staining the bandages. The other half is realising slowly that he can’t even trust Sam’s veins anymore.

Yet another rug being yanked out from under him.

As usual he opens the motel door to the sound of evening cicadas to throw out the water, and finds himself staring down into his dim reflection in the dark wine, wondering what the hell it means, and why the hell Sam is so enamoured of it. He understands something that Dean can’t.

Behind him the televangelist is wrapping up his sermon and Sam is nodding off, and Dean knows he should throw the wine away and come back inside to lay him down and kiss him goodnight the way he’s done every night since the wounds appeared, for lack of any better means of numbing Sam’s pain—a very little comfort—but he remains, staring into the bowl, trying to puzzle it out. He has to understand it. It has to make some kind of sense. It has to mean something.

“Dean?” Sam says softly from the bed.

Dean is gripped with a shudder and flings the bowl forward. It shatters on the sidewalk, little porcelain shards spinning confusedly in the splatter stain of wine.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This series belongs in part to Casey, whose contributions can be read [here](http://whiskyandoldspice.tumblr.com/fanfiction).
> 
> Cana of Galilee is where Jesus is said to have performed his first miracle--turning water into wine.


End file.
